Features these Characters

Belongs to these Storylines

623

Genchu knows how politics work. Fear will keep the locals in line, fear of this boom stick!

So when I try to think of any new and exciting media I’ve ingested that I want to blog about, and the answer is METAL GEAR SOLID V. But I’m so enraptured that I’d rather go play it than sit around writing about it. I do want to say some non-spoilery thoughts, though. I Kind of miss the days of Metal Gear games being a one shot, story driven adventure where you play an 8 hour campaign from beginning to end, and it’s all heavily orchestrated wrapped up in a neat package. When did Metal Gear become all about THE GRIND? I mean I’ve sunk maybe thirty hours into MGSV so far, and I’ve gotten practically nowhere. If this were any other Metal Gear game, I’d be on my third or fourth playthrough by now, but instead the game says I’m at 7% completion. That’s because MGSV is structured almost like an MMO in how it drip feeds you progress. In an MMO, if you want cool gear and items, you can craft, farm, hunt, gather, go on raids over and over in hopes of getting rare drops… It’s all crazy time consuming, but it does get you the cool stuff. MGSV is similar in that you can go out, gather, hunt, capture soldiers to recruit, and commandeer weapons and vehicles to expand your Mother Base. You can research new tech, and build new gadgets assuming you’ve stockpiled adequate resources and personnel. You can make a lot of progress unlocking items in the game without progressing the story, normally Metal Gear’s biggest focus, at all, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. Granted, MMOs bore me to tears, while doing all these menial tasks in MGSV is like living out an action movie, which I find totally engrossing.

Story-wise, it’s a weird part of the MGS timeline. I mean, all Metal Gears have weird, hyper detailed stories, which is why I love them, but I wonder if MGSV’s is kind of redundant. Admittedly I’m not very far into V’s story, but at the end of Peace Walker, Big Boss basically says “We’re our own nation of soldiers now, we’re not beholden to any government, and we’re nuclear equipped and we’ve got a Metal Gear.” Seems like if they jumped ahead 20 years and had Solid Snake infiltrating Outer Heaven, where Big Boss had holed up after having become disenfranchised with the rest of the world, that’d match up pretty nicely. The deeper MGSV goes into that story between Peace Walker and Metal Gear, the more retconned it all gets, especially if it basically has to end at the same point where Peace Walker ended, with Big Boss creating a nuclear equipped military nation state. MGS4 was a great end to the Solid series, it wrapped everything up beautifully, even including Big Boss at the end, someone who didn’t come off as evil but as a man who’d made decisions in grief that he’d come to regret. Why that person couldn’t have been the person we saw at the end of Peace Walker I’m not sure. I’m not yet convinced we needed a story bridge there. Still, I can’t complain too much since I’m LOVING MGSV’s gameplay, it’s wildly addicting for a long time fan of the series and the stealth game genre. What my dream ending for this game would be , and I doubt this will happen because no game sites have been flipping out about how great the ending is, we’d see Big Boss establish Outer Heaven secretly, and then establish Foxhound in a series of time skips. Then it would jump ahead to 1995, and we’d take control of Solid Snake, voiced by David Hayter, and we’d infiltrate Outer Heaven base as the game credits roll. Oh how I would flip out! Actually, if Konami wants more of my money, just get David Hayter to re-voice of all Big Boss’ lines and release a Hayter voice pack. Keifer Sutherland does a fine job, but there’s just something about Hayter’s performance that really makes me smile when I hear it. He’s kind of the heart of Metal Gear Solid to me, and that heart is missing in this latest and potentially final entry in the Solid series.

Still, it’s a pretty incredible game and anyone on the fence should just take the plunge!

They cause you to get arrested, boats to sink and dead arch rivals to return from the grave.

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

A convincing argument!

Insane Disciple

Arch rivals, pfft

Leo

Cold Wars were invented during the Sengoku Jidai! I saw it in a webcomic!

clogboy

As wildly inaccurate as guns were back then (a dozen soldiers holding black powder muskets would only do more damage than a modern day marksman holding a pistol if their guns were equipped with a bayonet), they were unmatched for impact energy and overall impressiveness (THIS HERE MA’ BOOMSTICK!)

oop

clogboy
history extraordinaire

clogboy

lol. Nope, just trying to find truth wherever I can. And occasionally I entertain myself with webpages where there’s none to be found. 😉

purplelibraryguy

Really, where they excelled was in making large numbers of relatively untrained peasants into something collectively dangerous. All you had to teach them was the reloading drill and to point the thing in the right general direction. And ammo was cheap compared to arrows and crossbow bolts.

But if you were to take 10,000 musket soldiers and stack them directly against 10,000 well trained longbowmen with plenty of arrows, I’m pretty sure the musketeers would go down hard. Longer range, faster rate of fire, better accuracy. It’s just, to get that force of longbowmen you had to make them train every week for their whole damn lives.

clogboy

Excellent point well made. If you had the guns, it was relatively quick and easy to raise an effective army due to pure numbers alone. And not only the weapons have progressed, but also the people using them. It’s awe inspiring to see today’s legendary warrior units.

Xinef

And then… peasants would rebel, because they had guns and combat experience, which isn’t a very safe combination with high taxes and low privileges.

purplelibraryguy

I’ve heard it said that Tokugawa, after having used them in the civil wars, suppressed guns after he won for that very reason.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/WeirdButCuteByGwyn?ref=hdr_shop_menu Neska

Heck, that was the very same logic behind limiting the possession of swords to samurai and turning the samurai into a hereditary caste rather than a meritocracy . . . which just resulted in ninja . . .

clogboy

And the basis for the 2nd amendment.

Da’Zlein

Yeah, back when guns were basically metal tubes with black powder in the back… of course, the guns they have here appear to be matchlocks (so they can be aimed with both hands) and are at least fairly accurate at about 15 feet if these pages are any indication:

But when is “back then” in context of this comic? I mean, the late 1500s-1600s (When Oda Nobunaga and the original Tokugawa were ruling), this would be correct. And that was when Japan had firearms (in fact, the best firearms on the planet).

But then Tokugawa outlawed firearms at the end of his reign, and they didn’t come back to Japan until the mid-1800s and the Meiji Restoration (the Rurouni Kenshin era). At that time, rifles were commonplace, and therefore accuracy concerns were greatly reduced.

In between, rifles had been around for a while but took some time to catch on. One reason the Americans won during the Revolutionary War was they had companies of riflemen using Long Rifles (sometimes called the Pennsylvania or Kentucky Rifle), a weapon that was invented for hunting in America in 1700 which may very well have been the first rifle used in warfare… but the rifling process was a German invention from the 1500s.

Then again, this webcomic is clearly an alternate parallel universe, so the weapons can be as accurate (or inaccurate) as Alex and Joe decide they should be.

Da’Zlein

Ricardo was able to shoot a board at about 20 feet in a single shot if that’s any indication of the accuracy of these guns…

KungFuKlobber

Indeed. Cortés brought 6 guns and 13 horses with him to Mexico; the natives were vastly more impressed with the horses than with the weapons.

Flaming Squirrel

I haven’t played Phantom Pain yet (probably won’t for a very long time), but one thing I heard Kojima say that bothered me was that he was changing a lot of the core canon, like Solid and Liquid being clones of Big Boss. That bothers me because so much of the story of 1, 2, and I’m assuming 4 revolved around that fact. What do you think?

…
Also, [insert mandatory witty joke about comic that only I think is funny].

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

I’ll believe it when it happens! I’ve been playing the game waaaay too much (I’m like 40 hours in, but I’ve only got 20% completion!). They’ve talked about clones, hinting that Big Boss was cloned ten years ago before his coma. So, as far as I can tell, it’s very much still canon. If we get some big plot twist stating otherwise, I’ll certainly be surprised. Even at the very end of Peace Walker, Miller states that two of Big Boss’ children have been born.

Sunwu

I think The Wataro are gonna use those guns to make a Metal Gear !!!!

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

In fact it’s the Senshin clan is making the Metal Gear, and Yori’s actually a triple agent working for the Patriots, Ina’s a clone of Yukizane but raised by Masuhiro to hide her lineage, since Yukizane is really the greatest soldier to ever live, BIGGER BOSS!

Sunwu

seems legit

Xinef

And Matrix and Lex are the only sane people in this world of madness…

Kid Chaos

Don’t stop not dying, Genchu!

IDPounder

“All right you primitive screw-heads, listen up! You see this? This is my BOOM stick!”

reynard61

“LET ME SHOW U IT!!!”

Minando

Fascinating. A priest who is actually…an holy man. Well, it IS an alternate universe.

KungFuKlobber

As in medieval times, much of the corruption that permeated the Roman Catholic Church resided in the halls of power. Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that Father Alvarez is definitely not a Jesuit.

Kid Chaos

Genchu: “And if that doesn’t work, I can always team up with my old buddies Ken and Yorikiro and DESTROY THE WATARO!!!”

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

Let’s be honest, this will likely be the end result.

Kid Chaos

So let it be written; so let it be done.

Xinef

And Rrrricarrrdo will call his old buddies, Flinty and Loki.

Da’Zlein

And let’s not forget that with Ricardo’s negotiation skills he’ll probably end up arrested and his entire stock will be dumped in a river anyway…

Gigi

Priest guy looks awfully introspective that last panel. I took you for the naïve one, but perhaps you have seen more than you let on??

Gigi

Oh and I just barely caught up and wanted to mention I am still laughing about fish ain’t breakfast.

All foreign language puns, be they in Japanese, Chinese, or Portuguese have been translated into English puns of equal or greater comedic effect. I promise.

Leticia Simon

Sorry for being that person, but:
“Water clan”, in Portuguese, would be translated into something like “Clã da Água”, so the priest probably wouldn’t mix ” Wataro clan” and that expression.
Considering the time setting, I’m pretty sure that the priest is familiar with some Brazilian indigenous legends, especially with one that talks about cannibal tribes in the Amazon forest, also known as the “Abaporu” tribes. Believe it or not, ” Wataro” and “Abaporu” sound preeeety similar, so it would be more believable if the priest was talking about the “Cannibal Clan” rather than the “Water Clan”.
But what the heck, that would make the text waaaaay less interesting/logical for an English-speaking person. So yeah. Just leave it like that.
Holy macaroni, it’s 2 am, and I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll probably regret this comment tomorrow, haha.

http://www.nn4b.com suburban_samurai

I love that you just hyper analyzed a word pun in a historical comic with 12 foot long swords, hot dog stands, and magic drugs that make you see duplicate people who can also hurt you with imaginary arrows. Oh no, I just thought too hard about my own comic, that’s something I try to avoid doing!!!

http://insolenz.echoing.org/ SotiCoto

Whoa.

The ambience of an excessively sunny day has really been captured here. Well done! =D